


Skinwalker

by DragonflyxParodies



Category: The Legend of Zelda & Related Fandoms, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Link remembers their past lives, SO, Shapeshifting, but uh, have this, less violence than expected!, that ain't gonna happen, this was supposed to be bigger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24022918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonflyxParodies/pseuds/DragonflyxParodies
Summary: He is a creature of fang and fur, and with that scent caught between his teeth and tongue, he lets the moonlight melt his flesh from his bones and runs.
Relationships: Link & Sheik (Legend of Zelda)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	Skinwalker

Things come together in that slow, syrupy way they do when the Goddesses don’t seek to interfere too much. It’s reassuring. Means it’ll be peaceful, this time. Or at least, _they_ will be peaceful.

Zelda calls for him in the evening, and he meets her in her garden.

The plants are subdued in the moonlight, greyscale and silent. In the light of dawn, they are a riot of color – herbs and poisonous blooms brilliant and eye-catching. She forsakes her gowns for leather and velvet, blue sleeves and trousers.

There’s been an incident, she says. Someone’s missing.

_Can you track him?_

He recognizes the smell on the harp she offers him. The wood’s well-worn and well-loved, and despite the holy magic humming within its bones he can smell the gravedirt and water layered atop it. The tang of copper and the velvet kiss of smoke.

He’s been hunting that scent for a while now, around the castle. A game. A pity it ends this way, with necessity and duty cutting it so short.

He breathes it in, and she tells him where her charge had last been located.

He is a creature of fang and fur, and with that scent caught between his teeth and tongue, he lets the moonlight melt his flesh from his bones and _runs_.

Zelda had caught her charge’s disappearance almost immediately. Tracking him is no great challenge.

The home is old and dilapidated, abandoned years ago at the very edge of Eldin province; Kakariko is long behind him. Zelda’s charge had entered voluntarily, but the reek of blood and rot suffusing the place hints that he’d not been able to leave in the same manner.

He dons the skin of man and makes no effort to hide his presence as he shoves the door open. He gets down two turns of a twisting hallway when a shape lunges at him, silver in its hand, out of a doorway.

It takes a heartbeat to pin his assailant against the wall, one hand gripping wrists so thin he’s half afraid he’ll snap them on accident.

Zelda’s charge is Sheikah, eyes unfocused and hazy as his chest rises and falls – too quickly. Panicked. Shock, maybe.

Blood is smeared down his jawline from a swollen, split lip, beaded on his throat, where Link presses a hand when the Sheikah’s body falls still.

Bandages wound about his thigh and his stomach are red, saturated through with blood. Around his left bicep, too – and his arms fall, limp, to his sides, blinking wild strands of white-blonde hair from his eyes as best he can with a bruised, blackened socket.

His hair is loose, strips of white cloth dangling loosely in the remains of braids and matted with dried blood.

Half-dead. Alive only out of spite, he thinks.

Link glances to the room the Sheikah had lunged out of; there lays a body brutalized so thoroughly there is nothing left of a face. It twitches.

When he tucks the Sheikah against his chest and pulls fang and fur over them, he feels it like a block of ice against his heart; he has never melded the flesh of another to his own before, and he shudders at the weight of it.

The journey there was quick, easy – the journey back is anything but.

Zelda waits on the ramparts for them.

X

He wakes to a silence that screams agony and unease and an aching in him that pounds harder than his own heartbeat, shaking despite the pain it brings him.

There’s a hand on his throat, the tight press of fingers against his pulse and his jaw, and he blinks away the blurriness of sleep to see a – _something_ – standing above him.

He is in the shape of a man, but Sheik hardly recognizes that; he sees that he is alive, and nearly weeps in relief.

He pushes that hand away and stands, finds the hand pressed hard against his hip when the world blots itself out in fuzz and shadow. Steadying.

He finds metal at his fingertips, is unsure where it came from – but he’s a betrayal to repay, a wrong to right. And though his thoughts seem faint and distant, though it takes him longer than it should to jolt his body into action –

The thing shaped like a man at his back follows.

**Author's Note:**

> Yet another Thing I started a long ass time ago and found floating around. Probably won't expand on it, but as far as I remember the only definitive thing that was gonna happen that isn't already in this is the explanation for what happened  
> and basically  
> Zelda's working some treaties out with some foreign dignitaries, and one of those assholes sets up an ambush for Sheik 'cuz he wants him captured alive. His kid died and he heard about Hyrule's Sheikah and was like omg problem solved, except thats not how it works???  
> So after Link brings Sheik back Sheik goes and slaughters the dude's men and then barges into the council room where, y'know, the whole council's chatting with these foreign dignitaries, and Sheik kills that dude too. Problem solved, they all live happily ever after, etc.


End file.
